With The Friday Code, Mansi Khanna gives a new spin to digital marketing

New Delhi-based The Friday Code is a marketing tech company that works with brands and organisations towards building their digital strategy.

As beginnings go, it all started over a cup of coffee shared between colleagues. Mansi Khanna, Muthu Saravanan, and Gopalswamy were discussing the pace at which digital advertising was growing and the massive opportunity it presented.

“After about three cups of coffee, my colleagues (now co-founders) and I were convinced we wanted to explore this opportunity and something in this space. That was one of the most memorable and life-changing days I have ever had. We began the registration process for The Friday Code the very next day,” recalls Mansi.

Mansi completed her MBA from IMT Ghaziabad in 2008, and has over 10 years of digital and ad tech experience before deciding to venture into entrepreneurship.

She started her career at Citibank, then worked for a short while at Spice Digital before joining Bharti Airtel to handle Mobile - Education, Mobile Health and then moved on as Head Mobile - Advertising.

Mansi says the digital advertising industry is growing rapidly with the advent of many tech companies. However, the medium for running digital marketing is still highly fragmented for the digital marketer who actually manages the brand and the spends.

“I recognised this need gap while I was heading mobile advertising at Airtel, where I worked with the top brands and agencies to sell our advertising product. The life of a digital marketer hinges upon multiple dashboards, multifarious jargons and innumerable Excel sheets. If we do a deep dive, for most, the cost of attribution is more than cost of acquisition. In some organisations the spend on tools and technology for tracking alone goes up to 18 percent of the total ad spends. High costs and lack of convenience and usability combined was a huge opportunity for us to explore. I sensed it, validated it, and was fortunate to have met my now co-founders who not only believed in the same opportunity but also bought different skill sets to the table. And so, our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product, Clock by TFC (and me as an entrepreneur) came into being,” she adds.

Elaborating on Clock, she says, “It is a smart marketing platform for managing digital marketing through a simple, intelligence-driven solution. It solves all digital marketing needs – Demand Side Platform (DSP), ad server, campaign manager, attribution and unified reporting. We have developed some excellent innovations in video as a digital advertising medium - right from introducing new formats to getting associated with some of the most premium video publishers. Our tech stack is also very robust with Microsoft mentoring us. Clock has a distinct advantage because unlike other tools in the market that only conduct a post-mortem after the money is spent, Clock’s intelligence layer and technology work real time to save money before you actually spend it. And we are compliant with the latest Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standards.”

The Friday Code has a business model that is based mainly on the platform licence fee. While the platform is completely self-served, it also offers a managed service-based model. Its target customers include brands, agencies, and networks in the digital advertising space. The Indian digital industry is nearly $1.6 billion - it is indeed a huge opportunity with very few Indian companies in this space.

Their biggest success so far was being rewarded with Microsoft Azure Credits worth $25,000 towards the culmination of the empoWer accelerator programme.

“This really gave us a boost and reaffirmed our belief of being on the right track. Positive responses from our clients and getting the accreditation from StartUp India, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, has been amazing,” Mansi says.

Though the company is bootstrapped, it receives some benefits from Microsoft and the StartUp India initiative. With a team of 11, The Friday Code looks forward to addressing many opportunities in the space.

“Our plan is to continue expanding our platform and product. We want to introduce newer video advertising formats and improve our machine learning algorithms with more data sources. We will also continue to build our extensive network of regional publishers,” she says.